Steven Paul Scher

Address:	Department of German Studies 6084 Dartmouth Hall Hanover, New Hampshire 03755-3511
Telephone:	(603) 646-2914
Fax:	(603) 646-1474
E-mail:	Steven.Scher@dartmouth.edu

With sadness we report that Steven Scher died suddenly of heart failure on the morning of December 25, 2004.

Steven Paul Scher, The Daniel Webster Professor of German and Comparative Literature, studied law and music in his native Budapest and received his degrees from Yale (Ph.D. 1966). He taught at Columbia and Yale before coming to Dartmouth and has also served as a guest professor at the Universities of Paderborn and Graz. He chaired German Studies from 1974-80 and again from 1993-96. A specialist in the interrelations of literature, music, and the other arts, he is the author and editor of numerous studies on that subject, as well as on other topics ranging from Old Norse to the Talking Heads and from Mozart to Brecht. His study of Verbal Music in German Literature appeared in 1968. In addition to his work as co-editor of the E.T.A. Hoffmann-Jahrbuch, he has edited Zu E.T.A. Hoffmann (1981), Literatur und Musik: ein Handbuch zur Theorie und Praxis eines komparatistischen Grenzgebietes (1984), Music and Text: Critical Inquiries (1992), and co-edited Postwar German Culture: An Anthology (1974) and Word and Music Studies: Defining the Field (1999).

On the occasion of his 65th birthday, the International Association for Word and Music Studies presented him with a Festschrift entitled Word and Music Studies: Essays in Honor of Steven Paul Scher (Amsterdam, New York: Rodopi, 2002). And in 2004, Rodopi also published a collection of some of his writings, Word and Music Studies: Essays on Literature and Music (1967-2004), edited by Walter Bernhart and Werner Wolf.